How true. I feel so sad for the past few generations who've had nothing but garbage like that to grow up with. The quality and content of today's cartoons are awful. I guess the truly funny and creative old time classics like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Popeye are not considered "PC" today.
NBC moved away from cartoons long ago. They found more syndication money in programs like “Saved By The Bell” which weren’t restricted to just “weekday mornings and afternoons”.
ABC is owned by Disney and Disney needs lots of programming for their cable/video empire (and new marketable characters).
Probably not. And yes, I feel sorry for them too.
If I had kids today, I wouldn’t let them watch that stuff on a dare.
ACT (Action for Childrens' Television) in the late 1960s castrated childrens' programming. Some of the members acknowledged that some of the resulting pablum was boring and unwatchable, but at least it wasn't offensive and had pro-social(ist) values.
They also drafted a blacklist of certain cartoons (largely containing wartime imagery like anti-Nazi violence and racist or ethnic imagery of black people, Jews, Irish, Italians, etc...). That blacklist was expanded in the 1970s to include violent imagery (cartoon use of guns) and in the 1980s expanded to include smoking (they now digitally paint out the cigarettes out of old cartoons, the most ludicrious example being Pecos Bill now rolling a non-existent cigarette). Whether ACT was in charge of the subsequent additional banned content matters not, it became the industry norm.
Those now-classic warner brothers and MGM cartoons were made for theatrical distribution under the studio system with a healthy budget per episode. Cartoon Network should be called "Flash-drek Nightly for stoners". Handmade animation is becoming a lost art. I was surprised to see that Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox was stop-motion animated rather than computer animated.